Interview: Scot at meridiancrest.com
Posted on April 3, 2007
Filed Under themes, design, interviews |
Young blogs can be interesting as they chase a look, a content balance and a purpose. I’ve been impressed with meridiancrest.com on both a content front and a style front as Scot has covered everything from his technorati mission to break into 5 figures to an interview with the guy behind wootagent.
The focus of our chat was on the design of his blog, so before we start here’s what we’ll be talking about. I love it when a standard theme gets a dramatic and effective makeover. Here’s what Scot achieved:
Of course another part of that equation is a degree of talent and photoshop skills that many of us lack. On with the interview:
Hi Scot, so how did your current design come about?
My blog is currently based on the well-designed GlossyBlue by ndesign. At the time that I decided to start writing, I didn’t exactly feel like skinning wordpress; but even if I did, I hadn’t enough time to do so. Sometimes you have to focus on what’s important, and to me that is writing quality content. Other blog superstars who focus on content are doing great (john chow dot com uses Misty, etc)
So why GlossyBlue?
Lately there has been a dramatic influx in the number of people using Misty. It’s a great theme but it has saturated the blogging market, especially the niche I sometimes write in, so I wanted something different.
I really like the current setup (shown above), where do you source your photography etc?
I change the color scheme and photography up sometimes, probably every other week just to keep things fresh. Most of the photography you find on my blog will come from two sources: sxc.hu or deviantart free stock galleries. These are incredible resources if you know how to search through the junk efficiently. I plan on implementing a rotating header and possibly even stylesheet to change the color theme up every time you load my site, so check back later!
From a branding point of view changing so much of the theme on a regular basis kind of terrifies me without a VERY striking logo / identity (think absolut vodka grade!). But then Scot has a strong eye for layout, so I’m sure he can keep enough commonality to retain a consistent ‘feel’ for readers.
If he keeps finding original, interesting photography to work with, like the pic above by yellow stock on deviantart, he should be able to retain the quality feel.
One of the key reasons all bloggers tend to start with a standard theme is simply the time committment required to create one from scratch. Any plans to make that move at some point?
A quality theme from scratch is on the docket, for sure. I just need to take the time to sit down and learn the Wordpress codex, then go from there. Time is money, and you often have to decide if the time it takes you to learn the templating system and create a custom theme is really worth the pay off. It probably is for me, but only time will tell.
Thanks very much to Scot for his time in the interview, hopefully this will inspire some similar reworkings of solid, popular themes like GlossyBlue.
If you know of other blogs which have achieved similarly impactful results do let me know in the comments below.
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Hey Steve,
Thanks for taking your time to shoot me a couple of questions, I like how it turned out. Keep up the good work.
– Scot
I just love that header image Scot! : ) And I’m totally with you on the fact that time is money - I want to redesign my blog from scratch too, but I just don’t have the time…
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